Chapter 1007 — The Bone-Grinder

Palin Winterhold came to the high terrace of the fortress, and from there he could survey at a glance the direction of the inner-city barracks — the Empire's banner, black field and crimson veins, flew high above them; fierce, combative soldiers moved among the camps, and farther off, mage towers rose one after another through the inner city, the mage-eyes atop them monitoring the whole district without pause.

He raised his head again and looked to the distant west — but today's leaden sky and the thin mist in the air blocked his sight; he could not see Winterwolf Fortress, now in Cecilite hands, and certainly not the still more distant Longwind Fortress.

Was An Luo still safe in Cecilite territory?

The Count of Winterhold sighed softly, set aside his pointless worry for the moment, and then used his magic to communicate with the several mage towers set in the inner city, confirming that not one mage-eye had detected anything unusual.

The mage-eyes' primary task was not, in fact, to watch the world beyond the fortress — what they truly guarded against were the knightly orders quartered within it and the several supplementary barracks outside the walls.

Those barracks seethed with knights and soldiers burning for battle, and with priests and battle-officiants devout to the point of fanaticism; they were the mainstay of this war — and its greatest consumable. Since the fighting began, the forces in the Winterhold region had grown to more than six times their normal strength, and still every day new soldiers and priests poured from the rear to the front, making this narrow battlefield ever more crowded, and ever more dangerous.

In Palin Winterhold's eyes, what the magic-guided trains brought from the rear each day was not an army but fresh corpses.

And unlike ordinary "corpses," these "corpses" gathered at Winterhold were exceedingly prone to losing control; steeped in fanatical impulses of thought, their nervous systems and outward perceptions had mutated into something human and yet not human. In appearance they seemed ordinary men, but within... they had long since become something twisted that even dark sorcery could not penetrate.

Yet here, at the very front, there were still means to control these dangerous, twisted contaminators — simply bind them strictly by the rules of war, let them duly vent the fanatical pressure of the divine realm, or administer large doses of psycho-sedative agents, and their destructive impulses could be suppressed or their mutation slowed — at least for the time being.

It was a dangerous equilibrium, every day a walk along a knife's edge, and Palin Winterhold's task here was to maintain that fragile balance on the blade, and, within the threshold before matters spun out of control... to consume these fresh "corpses" with the greatest efficiency and in the best possible manner.

He felt like a technician in a burnstone acidification plant controlling the combustion vats, every day calculating with precision the fuel and alchemical accelerant to be fed into the fire. Human lives passed through his hands in cold calculation, ready at any moment to be cast into the blazing fires of war when the furnace door next opened. He kept the heat of those flames here, and by it gradually scoured away the corruption afflicting the Empire, probed and weakened Cecil's strength, gathered data from the battlefield, adjusted the balance of the scales...

He knew that everything he did held great significance, and still he found it all revolting.

War should not be like this — and he should not be the one doing such things.

"It's a bit colder here than I imagined," a voice came from beside him, rousing the somewhat distracted Count of Winterhold from his thoughts, "though it's hard to say which is more unbearable, Aldernan or here — the cold here is like a blade, hard and sharp; the cold in Aldernan is like a bog, damp and suffocating."

The Count of Winterhold turned at the sound and nodded in greeting to Count Clement Dart standing beside him — this Aldernan noble had arrived at Winterhold with today's troop train; nominally he was the commander of that reinforcement force, but in substance... he too was one of the "consumables" delivered by that magic-guided train.

"This winter is colder than any in years," the Count of Winterhold said. "Soldiers from the central and southern regions find it hard to adapt here. Still, compared with Cecil's northern frontier, this counts as mild."

"Soldiers..." Clement Dart repeated the word softly, his gaze fixed on the distance, sweeping across those barracks where the Imperial banners flew. "Count of Winterhold, these are outstanding young men, truly outstanding... They should all have had bright futures; they should not be dying in this bitter winter."

Palin Winterhold was silent for two seconds, then said slowly, "Before the malice of the gods, mortals are simply this fragile. Our homeland must be reborn through fire, and what you see... is the price of the flames' scorching."

"I see only meaningless attrition, a long war of grinding, and no effective counterattack — neither against the Cecilites nor against the gods," Clement said in a low voice. "You tell me: does burying spiritually contaminated soldiers and priests over and over on this narrow battlefield truly mean anything? Is this bloodletting to drain the poison, or merely bleeding away our vitality for nothing?"

The Count of Winterhold looked into Clement's eyes, and only after a long while did he slowly nod. "I choose to trust His Majesty's judgment."

"...A fine reason indeed," Count Clement smiled, drew a deep breath of the cold northern air, then turned and walked slowly toward the terrace's exit. "In any case, I am already standing here... save me a good spot."

Palin Winterhold watched Clement depart at an unhurried pace, his eyes narrowing slightly; in his mind he had already begun calculating the value this "conservative opposition noble" might produce here, and where the reinforcement force he had brought ought to be spent.

...

On the Winterwolf Fortress–Shadowmarsh line, a cold wind was sweeping across the rolling hills and the low woods scattered along the frozen ground. Loose snow was lifted by the wind, spinning and striking the relay posts on either side of the railway, and within the faintly shimmering rail shield, the heavily armored, imposing armored train Iron Throne — Jörmungandr advanced along the line at cruising speed.

The repulsion generators on either side of the train flickered with the glow of runes; the repulsion points and the mechanisms at the car couplings adjusted their angles minutely, slightly increasing the train's speed. Snowflakes swept up by the wind from afar passed harmlessly through the shield and were drawn into the howling rush beneath the cars, while on a parallel track some distance away, a light armored train of the Iron Scepter, assigned to escort duty, ran neck and neck with the Jörmungandr.

At the rear of the Iron Scepter's escort gun-car, in the engineering car responsible for maintaining the rails, a war technician had just finished adjusting the valves and screws of certain equipment. He raised his head from his work and looked through the narrow window set in the car's side at the snow-covered plain outside, muttering softly, "This damned snow has finally stopped... Since mid-Fogmonth I've scarcely seen a clear day."

"Clear weather isn't necessarily a good thing... those Typhonians may be more active than before," another war technician beside him shook his head. "They've come to sabotage the railway more than once already, though most of the time it came to nothing... but they say last time they nearly succeeded in blowing up Line 7."